Greeley man tells migrants’ tales in new book

David White is something of an oxymoron in the polarized immigration debate. It’s an emotional debate that mostly concentrates people into one camp or the other. Few bother to wade into the vast gulf between the nuanced and complex area where there is no black and white.

White, 75, is a retired technical writer who became interested in immigration for a few reasons.

First, there was the dramatic shift in the demographics of the Southern California city of Ontario, where White and his wife, high school sweethearts transplanted from Indiana, noticed while raising their family. They moved to Greeley 10 years ago, following their five children who all migrated to northern Colorado.

Then, Dave met “Fernando” at the site of a local construction project a few years ago. He learned Fernando was an illegal immigrant, along with his wife, “Sara.” He became interested in what drove this couple, who had two children, to come to the United States.

Lastly, White had an affinity for writing, and he was looking to exercise his storytelling muscles. Immigration gave him a meaty topic with interesting personal tales suited to journalistic reports.

Those elements resulted in a piece, “Fernando and Sara’s Story,” which is one of eight stories about immigrants in his manuscript called “I Am An Illegal Alien.” The opening line in the introduction says, “‘I Am An Illegal Alien’ is a book about people … not statistics or the law. The book is a collection of stories of human beings from planet Earth who are struggling for survival … the same way as you and I.”

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He’s trying to get the book, completed in 2007, published. He got a bite from Cornell University for a collaborative book, but the co-author, a Cornell professor, ended up taking the project in a different direction.

White says he became curious about what motivated Latino immigrants to journey north. Did they have any idea of what awaited them in the United States?

The answers to that question, though varying, strike a theme.

“I found there were a lot of people who had no idea of what they were getting into when they came across the border,” White says. “They kind of got stuck here and have to start living in the shadows – that kind of thing.”

“Ernesto’s Story,” the first chapter, tells of a Honduran man who loses his job as a teacher. He takes a job in a Honduran cannery, scrounging to support his wife and newborn daughter, and finally is lured to the U.S. by an older brother who is making a decent living, albeit as an illegal immigrant. Ernesto manages to evade border agents, travel to Colorado and find work in a restaurant in Steamboat Springs.

Two years later, he contracted with a coyote to bring his wife, who suffered from anemia, and young daughter to the United States. The smuggling operation went awry, however, and the pair ended up stranded for several days in the desert. Ernesto’s daughter was dead when authorities found them, and his wife died a short time later in a Nogales, Mexico, hospital.

White also delves into “Operation Wagon Train,” the multi-state immigration raid on then-Swift & Co. meatpacking plants in 2006. He writes about the case of a Guatemalan illegal immigrant who was caught in the raid. He learns how the man got here, bought false documents and got a job at Swift. White followed the man’s initial court hearings in Weld County but ended up losing track of him.

While most politicians don’t care to touch immigration with a 10-foot pole, White says, “I just wanted to get into the personal lives of people and how they’re affected by this whole thing. It’s a total mess.”

While their stories resonate on a human level – “these people are human beings on this Earth, the same as you and I,” White says, echoing his book’s introduction – the author doesn’t shirk the legal foundation on which an ordered society is moored.

The law is the law, White says repeatedly, and he emphasizes that immigrants must play by the rules. He said many of the subjects he interviewed deserve to be deported for obtaining false documents, even if it was through a third party. He said many of them support federal enforcement programs such as Secure Communities, where fingerprints of everyone booked into jail are run against FBI and immigration records to determine who is in the country illegally, because such efforts weed out the worst criminals among immigrants.

The process of telling these stories has sharpened White’s powers of observation and skepticism. “You have to sort of trust or have some sense about you of determining if the guy is telling the truth or lying through his teeth,” he says.

So goes the gray area of immigration. White enjoys exploring the muddled middle-ground.

“When you look into the lives of people, that’s kind of the bottom line,” he says. “But I do believe that the laws ought to be enforced for what they are.”